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cc-nz - Re: [Cc-nz] The Creative Anti-Commons

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Subject: Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand discussion

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  • From: "strypey AT riseup.net" <strypey AT riseup.net>
  • To: "Creative Commons Aotearoa (NZ)" <cc-nz AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Cc-nz] The Creative Anti-Commons
  • Date: Sun, 03 Dec 2006 18:57:40 +1300

Kia ora koutou

Damian, just thought this was worth sharing as I have seen very few
articles by anyone critical of CC and I think considering critical
viewpoints helps us towards a richer understanding of what we are
advocating for.

Actually I agree with many of the points you've raised here. I would add
that the key benefit of CC licenses is that they explicitly allow the
work to be obtained and shared with others without legal or financial
barriers. This defends people's rights to do the digital equivalent of
picking up a book or magazine and browsing through it without
immediately being stung for royalties to the authors/ publishers or the
owner of the copy being sued for copyright infringement.

With all-rights-reserved copyright or no copyright license at all, my
browser could be breaching copyright by caching a webpage on my hard
drive. This creates a confusing situation where people and institutions
play it safe and are unable to realise many of the exciting things made
possible by digital infostructure, unless they are willing to break bad
laws as a sort of civil disobedience.

I do have some sympathy for looking beyond the producer/consumer split
model. To paraphrase Hakim Bey, rather than an artist being a special
kind of person, each person is a special kind of artist. In the digital
world where anyone online can make their own copy, All-rights-reserved
serves the interest of one artist by denying all other artists the
freedom to creatively reinterpet their work. All-rights-reserved was
designed to create protection for authors from the owners of printing
presses, where the power to mass distribute is concentrated in an elite.
The NonCommercial and NonDerivus aspects CC licenses recognise the
difference between the many-to-many distribution of the net and the
one-to-many distribution of the RIAA and large publishers which I think
is fine.

RnB
Strypey

Damian Stewart wrote:
> strypey AT riseup.net wrote:
>
>
>> The point of the above is clear, the Creative Commons, is to help "you"
>> (the "Producer") to keep control of "your" work. The right of the
>> "consumer" is not mentioned, neither is the division of "producer" and
>> "consumer" disputed. The Creative "Commons" is thus really an
>> Anti-Commons, serving to legitimise, rather than deny, Producer-control
>> and serving to enforce, rather than do away with, the distinction
>> between producer and consumer.
>>
>
> This view is overly simplistic, misses the point, and ignores the fact
> that Creative Commons as a system implicitly includes the rights of
> consumers. The ultimate right to decide whether or not consumers have
> the right to do particular things rests with the artist/producer, yes,
> but this is true with the GPL as well. As the author of a piece of code
> I can choose whether to release it under the GPL (derivates must also be
> GPL'd) or the LGPL (derivates need not be GPL'd), and this reflects the
> producer/consumer dichotomy also: the producer of code is the one who
> decides whether it will be GPL'd or LGPL'd (or full-blown copyrighted,
> or released to the public domain, or whatever).
>
> It's all very well to do away with the distinction between producer and
> consumer in theory, but in the real world there is actually someone who
> makes something, which they then release to other people. Other words
> like Artist or Musician and Audience could do the place of Producer and
> Consumer here but the division is still there.
>
> The biggest advantage of Creative Commons in my mind is that it adds
> another choice to the artists. If an artist truly doesn't believe in the
> producer/consumer split they can release their works to the public
> domain. Creative Commons is there for artists who believe that, because
> they have made something themselves, they ought to hold some special
> kind of privileges of 'ownership' (there's /that/ word) over it.
>
>





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